Weirder still, the bird, with its “one shiny jet-black eye … blinking slowly, in a leathery wrinkled socket…” can speak. The bird whooshes into their home, embracing the widower under his wing - the father explains the bewildering sensation: “Feathers between my fingers, in my eyes, in my mouth, beneath me a feathery hammock lifting me up a foot above the tiled floor.”
The book is narrated from rapidly alternating perspectives, the unnamed Dad - a Ted Hughes scholar trying to finish a book about his controversial subject called “Ted Hughes’ Crow on the Couch: A Wild Analysis” - the unnamed Boys, and Crow.Ĭrow is an interloper in the form of a human-sized bird who arrives, like some kind of bizarro Mary Poppins, to seemingly assist and support the trio in their grieving process. “Grief Is the Thing With Feathers” tells a story of a newly widowed father of two boys living in London, wrestling with the grief of losing the wife and mother of their small clan.
The award - $43,000 for a book of fiction by a writer 39 or younger - is meant to be significant support to a writer at the beginning of his or her career. So although it doesn’t make up for that book’s awardlessness, it is heartening to see Max Porter’s first book, “Grief Is the Thing With Feathers” - an excellent fragmentary novella with a title referencing Emily Dickinson’s poem that is as sad and electric and, yes, short - win the substantial Dylan Thomas Prize. It made year-end best lists, sold well and was shortlisted for major awards - yet won none. For that it received near-universal acclaim by critics who found it difficult to describe. of Speculation” was a tether that kept me from floating away during my own first year as a mother it was smart, experimental, unflinching and tender. of Speculation,” a book that was both funny and frosty, and provocative and sad on the subjects of marriage, motherhood and the expected role of women in families. I saw evidence of this with the publication of Jenny Offill’s stunning 2014 novel, “Dept. It is time to retire the diminutive words often called upon to describe shorter novels and novellas and works of nonfiction - slim, spare, compact, jewel-of-a or worse, quick, fast, light, little - anything that suggests a book is missing something in length or heft - for the underlying (perhaps unintentional) implication is that the book is a simpler or speedier read, or that it was somehow easier to write.
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